Abigale, Eloquent First-Year Is a Fun and Unique Commander

Abigale, Eloquent First-Year | Art by Mark Zug

Lorwyn Eclipsed showcases a world defined by balance, where factions keep an uneasy peace and even the plane itself contains a daytime and nighttime aspect of itself. Beyond the transforming legends like Eirdu, Carrier of Dawn, there are also new legends that restrict their own abilities, leading to interesting choices. Today we'll be building a Commander deck around one of them: Abigale, Eloquent First-Year.

What Does Abigale, Eloquent First-Year Do?

Abigale can act as pseudo-removal by getting rid of the scariest text box on the battlefield, but she also gives that creature a terrifying trio of aggressive ability counters. On the other side of the coin, she can upgrade our own creatures into flying threats, but the creatures that work best with flying, first strike, and lifelink will lose any of those synergistic clauses.

It's so refreshing to see an ability this balanced and yet this cool, especially after the last few years, where Commander-focused design has led to fewer downsides and fewer dilemmas. And the flavor of Abigale rewriting another creature, literally talking over it, transports the Silverquill magic system to Lorwyn without losing anything in translation.

Abigale is costed very efficiently, and comes with a slew of aggressive keywords herself, pushing us towards an assertive game plan. The first place to look for any card with a downside is a way to turn that downside into a positive, and in Abigale's case, there's an easy and entertaining solution. As long as she only removes negative abilities from our creatures while giving them keywords, we're golden.

There are several under-costed beaters with downsides that would love gaining flying, first strike, and lifelink. Woolly Razorback, Waning Wurm, and Rotting Regisaur stand out as perfect candidates.

The other way to break the symmetry on Abigale is to find ways of using or removing counters, both from our creatures and our opponents' creatures. Chisei, Heart of Oceans is a great place to look for inspiration on how to dive into those shenanigans, and black gives us potent tools like Hex Parasite and Thief of Blood.

All of these angles added together make for a deck that can play offense or defense as the situation demands, and can play the politics game by creating and leveraging wacky board states on all sides of the table.

Key Cards for Abigale, Eloquent First-Year

Step one of our plan is to include ways to reuse Abigale's enter trigger, since that is the engine around which our deck will be built. Ephemerate and Cloudshift get the job done directly, but we can also lean on efficient graveyard-based recursion since our commander is low on the curve. Unearth and Helping Hand return her from the graveyard to wreak havoc again, and Undying Evil and Undying Malice give her a reset the next time she would die.

In a pinch, we can use the old command zone as a way to reset her; she's so cheap that we can bring her out a couple more times before her cost gets prohibitive.

While our opponents will surely present targets whose text boxes we want to erase, we should be proactive and play a good number of our own as well. There are tons of big creatures with downsides, so we're playing specifically the ones that deal with counters in some way, as those will interact well with our counter-manipulation strategy.

Phyrexian Soulgorger is huge, and its cumulative upkeep cost is exorbitant, but if we can turn that into evasion and lifelink, it becomes a serious threat. Rot-Curse Rakshasa is crazy efficient if it sheds its decayed, and can spam counters on our opponents' creatures after it dies. We've already mentioned Woolly Razorback and Waning Wurm, which keep their counters even if they lose their abilities.

Finally, Archfiend of the Dross is even better in this deck than normal, since we can take advantage of its life draining ability until it runs low on oil counters before targeting it with Abigale.

That's enough big threats to draw one or two almost every game, but we'll need some serious disruption to ride them to victory. Luckily, Abigale provides that disruption by removing abilities from our opponents' creatures, though she needs some support.

Thrull Parasite and Hex Parasite are two of the best versions of this effect since we can use them repeatedly and at instant speed. Ferropede and Etched Slith are also very good in this deck as repeatable counter-removers.

Mutated Cultist and Dramatist's Puppet make the cut as one-time effects, and the latter has the upside of working well with our blink package.

While we're playing around in this area, there are a number of powerful cards that remove counters from our own creatures. Not only can these act as alternatives to our commanders to enable threats like Woolly Razorback and Phyrexian Soulgorger, they also give us flexibility with our resources. Not all of our ability counters will be useful all the time, and these effects give us ways to take advantage of whatever isn't pulling its own weight.

Scholar of New Horizons is an incredibly efficient piece of ramp and card advantage that should see way even more play than it does. Power Conduit and Moxite Refinery can turn our counters into stat boosts, and Fain, the Broker can turn them into mana. Sanctuary Warden fills out our top-end and gives us cards in return for counters.

Another reason to dip further into the counter-removing can of worms is that it opens up some weirdo synergies. We can reuse the chapter abilities on Sagas (especially creature Sagas that are easier for us to remove counters from), turning Summon: Ixion or Summon: Primal Odin into repeatable removal spells and Summon: Yojimbo into a pillow fort machine.

The new Eirdu, Carrier of Dawn gives all of our creatures persist, which can get out of hand if we can get rid of their -1/-1 counters. And we can "cheat" Overlord of the Balemurk into being a creature faster if we remove its time counters.

One final upside of effects that remove counters is their interaction with finality counters. Finality counters exist to prevent repeated recursion, so we can create grindy value engines if we can get rid of them.

Zoraline, Cosmos Caller can recur our commander and any of our other cheap creatures when it attacks, and Osteomancer Adept gives us a mini Underworld Breach every turn. Hundred-Battle Veteran is tailor-made for this deck, returning itself with a finality counter and also caring about us having three different types of counters among our creatures.

Seriously, it's like it was designed with Abigale in mind.

Winning the Game with Abigale, Eloquent First-Year

Flying, first strike, and lifelink are three great ways to win a game of Commander. A good part of our strategy will be to attack early and often with oversized beaters, hoping that the life we gain will be enough to help us race our opponents. Abigale's disruption can let us play a tempo role at the table, picking apart our opponents' synergy engines without making them feel too bad about it.

We can also play for the long game if we need to. Abigale is an incredible tool for table politics, offering both punishment and reward for our opponents' actions. We can arm our opponents with resources to deal each other damage while holding up the option to disarm their counters if they attack us.

While this deck is built around fair, honest Magic, it is nice to have at least one "I win" button to keep our opponents on their toes. In this deck, that button is Hatred. Abigale is so cheap for an evasive lifelinker, and all we have to do is pay twenty life, which we will gain back in the course of knocking out a player with commander damage.

Even without our commander on the field, Hatred is a great sneak attack in a deck full of lifelink. It won't come up every game, but when it does our opponents will never forget about it afterwards.

Abigale, Eloquent First-Year Commander Deck List

This deck is good, clean fun. We get to play some downright goofy cards, layering synergies until we arrive at a plan that offers meaningful decisions every turn.

Abigale, Eloquent First-Year is a crash course in Commander politics and threat assessment. She helms an interactive, proactive strategy that asks its pilot to identify what really matters about every board state, every turn. Plus, some of our best cards are forgotten bangers like Thief of Blood and Woolly Razorback!

There's something here for everyone, from the players who want to harness flexibility to gain an edge to the players who just want to play big silly creatures.